Finding Yourself
by Ezra Marcel
Summary: A sad attempt at the horror that is the 100 Themes Challenge. General rating is K but rating will vary between chapters. Chapters will be charactercentric, shipcentric, etc. Chapter 6: Dandelion Seed.
1. Violinist

**Fun fact:** _NERDS_ is one of my favorite book series. I used to have some fic up for it before I changed my penname, but I took it all down, haha. (You're welcome.) I've been having an issue with writer's block lately, so I decided to turn to the dreaded 100 Theme Challenge and see how far I could get before I decided to throw myself out a window.

Anyway.

**Challenge Number:** One

**Challenge Prompt:** Violinist

**Challenge Subject:** Ruby Peet

**Rating:** K

THIS IS A LINE BREAK

"You have a lot of talent, Ruby."

The eleven-year-old looked up at her teacher, who was gazing affectionately at the violin in her lap.

"I've never heard anybody play that instrument the way you do. It's incredible." Mr. Bright, middle-aged with hair graying at the temples, met Ruby's eyes. "I'd be honored if you would allow me to help you hone your talent."

Ruby looked down at her instrument – something she had been forced to begin for use in a cover story. The violin had provided excellent excuses not to be home in time for dinner (though she was usually anywhere but the music room at Nathan Hale Elementary at the time). It was special to her simply because of its convenience. She had no particular affinity for its sound, or the vibrations that flowed through her body every time she stroked the strings with her bow. It was a necessity she had never thought to enjoy before.

"Playing music is also a great way to release your aggressions," Mr. Bright added suddenly, and Ruby looked up at him.

"What aggressions?" she asked suspiciously, and he laughed.

"Ruby, I might be old, but I'm not blind," he said kindly. He smiled at her, and the laugh lines around his eyes deepened. "You are a frustrated girl. There is almost always _something_ bothering you." He reached forward and tapped the violin with his finger. "Sometimes all it takes is a few minutes of screechy notes to make yourself feel a million times better."

Ruby looked down at the violin and plucked one of its strings. Mr. Bright chuckled. "Why don't you take that home and try making yourself feel better?" he asked. "And, if you find that you like the way you feel afterwards, don't be afraid to come see me again. My offer for private lessons will stand for as long as you're interested. Okay?"

Ruby nodded, not looking away from the block of wood in her lap.

When Ruby got home a bit later, she quietly made her way up the stairs and to her bedroom. It was raining outside, and water ran in parallel lines down the glass of her windows. Her bed was made, her floor clean, her desk organized. Perfect, the way she left it every morning. She stood before the full-length mirror hanging on her wall. Her mismatched, unfashionable reflection seemed to mar the beauty of her perfectly polished bedroom. Her poofy pigtails and oversized glasses, her awkwardly-upturned nose and her too-long neck, her clothing that suggested colorblindness and her gawky body that was too tall for elementary school and still too short for junior high stared back at her, sitting against the backdrop of a perfect bedroom the way a smudge would sit in the middle of one of the lenses of her glasses.

She opened her violin case and pulled the instrument from its velvet lining. She plucked the bow from its matching resting place and pressed her chin into its cradle. She adjusted her fingers and placed her bow against the strings, pushing gently against them and listening to the clear note that rung out into her otherwise silent bedroom. The note was crisp and familiar – one of her warm-up notes at school. Fine and ordinary and by the book, just like everything else in her life.

Ruby glided the bow across the strings again, never breaking eye contact with her own reflection. The same note rang out again.

_Boring._

She repeated the motion.

_Ordinary._

And again.

_Perfectionist._

Sudden frustration controlling the muscles in her arm, she rocketed the bow so quickly past the strings that it slipped, emitting an unattractive shriek that shattered the ever-present barrier between herself and the outside world that seemed to exist in her bedroom. She saw something in the eyes of her reflection, then. Something that sparked, glowed, for just a moment behind those thick glasses.

She repeated the movement, relishing in the awful cry of the violin strings in a bedroom completely devoid of any feeling, of any emotion, of any music. Keeping her instrument balanced between her cheek and her shoulder, she turned from the mirror and wandered through her bedroom, continuing to bring the bow across the strings, playing pretty notes and awful ones in a cacophonous symphony of sheer _noise._

As her arm worked to continue producing the melody of jumbled notes, she approached the laundry basket sitting against her wall, containing last night's pajamas. With a small smile, she kicked the basket over. As it tipped to its side, emptying its contents onto her floor, she played the same rude note from the beginning of her experiment. She walked to her bedside table and thumped it with her hip, watching as the pile of books that sat on it slid from their already-precarious position and crashed to the floor.

As her bedroom filled with the roar of badly-executed notes (or were they well-executed notes that just happened to be terrible?), she stepped onto her bed, completely ignoring the sneakers still adorning her feet. With a little shriek of glee, she punted one of her pillows off the bed and onto the floor. She jumped, kicking spare blankets from the foot of her bed, swatting at her other pillows, jumping and jumping until the top of her head nearly brushed the ceiling, and just as she thought the music couldn't get any louder, she stopped.

She did one last bounce, falling all the way down onto her bottom onto the now very-ruffled blankets of her bed. She pulled the violin away from her face and set it in her lap. She gazed down at it, her mouth just slightly agape, amazed at the sudden onset of… of _wildness _that had overcome her for no reason other than that she suddenly had complete control over this ridiculous instrument. She had complete control over _something_. After the whole fiasco with Brand coming in and introducing someone to the team _she_ was supposed to be leading, after one of her teammates abandoned the group that they had practically shared custody of, after so many tragedies and triumphs that seemed completely out of her hands, she had control over _something_.

Finally.

She looked up and found herself staring back into the eyes of her reflection. Something was different, though. She no longer appeared to be a bit of dirt on a clean backdrop, an ink smudge on otherwise flawless paper. She was the same – mismatched and plain – but suddenly she appeared so much more at home in this room. Because it wasn't so flawless anymore, was it? Her hamper and pajamas lay on their sides near her door. Her bedding was rumpled and messy and unmade. Her pillows and spare blankets littered the floor. The books on her bedside table lay on her carpet like a child's building blocks. It was imperfect, flawed, and a bit of a mess.

A bit like her.


	2. Supernova

**Fun fact:** I am a lazy sack and only got around to this now because I'm bored and don't have access to the new NERDS book for a few more weeks. This drabble takes place in my own little world in which, about a decade from canon, Heath's head is back to its normal size. He's still an asshole, though.

**Challenge Number:** Two  
**Challenge Prompt:** Supernova  
**Challenge Subject:** Heathcliff Hodges  
**Rating:** T

THIS IS A LINE BREAK

The motel room was small and cheap, and filled with steam from the shower Heathcliff had just gotten out of and yet refused to turn off. It wasn't like _he_ was paying the water bill. Sure, he wasn't tearing the world apart at the seams, but a little low-level villainy never helped anyone. He walked out of the bathroom and into the small, square room that served as the rest of his housing. A towel, damp with steam, hung around his distressingly pale, exceedingly freckled waist. He kept it up with one hand, though he acknowledged vaguely in the back of his mind that there really wasn't anyone around to complain if he were to just drop it.

He flipped open the top of his suitcase with his foot and got down on his knees to dig through it. Ever since escaping those annoyingly persistent NERDS (for, what, the fourteenth time? Fifteenth? He was on his way to losing count.) and having to seek shelter in a motel nestled in the middle of scenic Buttfuck, Nowhere, his entire life had turned into one big cloud of self-doubt and insignificant villainous gestures. Seriously, letting a shower run for a while? Really? That was _it_? He was tearing up the national mall when he was eleven. Had he really peaked at eleven? _ELEVEN_?

He dropped the towel and pulled on one of the pairs of briefs in his messy suitcase. He was going to need to pick up some more clothes, once he hitched a bus back to civilization. As he tried to tug the jeans up his wet legs he considered the moniker he could use this time around. He was thinking about something… astronomical. He had always had a thing for space and stars and the like. His parents had gotten him a telescope for Christmas one year (along with a new bookshelf and the entire unabridged works of Ernest Hemingway) and he had spent many a Friday night gazing and labeling stars on a star chart of his own creation. His parents had been very impressed with it. The last time he had seen his parents, it was hanging in a very nice frame in their front room, right above the sofa.

He figured it was probably gone now, along with anything else in that house that had even a bit to do with him. Report cards, school projects, letters of recommendation, a birth certificate… all tossed in a paper shredder, and then burned, probably.

(In actuality, all of those things had been scanned into Benjamin's CPU and the hard copies were residing, perfectly intact, in one of the Playground's many storage rooms. Heathcliff assumed this to be true, as well, but the idea that everything in the world that held his imprint was floating around as a million ash participles was somehow more fulfilling to his villainous personality. Every good villain has a tragic backstory, after all.)

Wait, what was he – oh, right, the pseudonym. The moniker. The nickname. Alias. Non de plume. Secret identity.

The Black Hole. Hm. Drop the 'The.' Black Hole. That sounded menacing. Heathcliff smiled as he imagined all he could do with the costume. He thought of a cape, and one of those masks that only cover the eyes. Everything perfectly black. Black holes were mysterious and strong. Powerful. Suck anything in and…

Well, and what? It just went away, right?

Heathcliff frowned. That didn't sound like him. That sounded like a vacuum cleaner. Things like a villainous moniker – that was supposed to reflect who the person was, what they did. Heathcliff most certainly wasn't a black hole. He had more to offer than that, didn't he?

A comet, maybe. Comet? Shooting Star? Come blazing in out of nowhere and crash, causing devastation everywhere, and then –

No. Because there is no 'and then.' Not at the end of a shooting star. There's nothing. It's a shooting star, and then it's nothing.

The Eclipse, he thought. He could be eclipsing… good, or something. That didn't sound terrible, actually. Kind of creative. Good flow. The costume would be more difficult, but it wouldn't take him long to think of something presentable. Something impressive. Something to strike fear into the hearts of all those who opposed him. Because who can oppose an eclipse? It's too big to stop. He could call his henchmen Red Dwarfs, because those are the most common stars. Heathcliff felt himself grinning. Oh, yes, this was going to work out perfectly. He could black out all the goodness in the world with the power of his –

The sound of the running shower halted his dream sequence and brought him back to the steam-filled motel room in the middle of Buttfuck, Nowhere. Because that was all he had to offer. Letting the shower run while he wasn't in it. Marginally running up the water bill of this shoddy motel. He doubted they paid their bills anyway.

With an audible sigh, he sat down on the bed and listened to the springs squeak in protest. How pathetic. He wasn't a black hole, a comet, an eclipse. He wasn't good enough for that. Strong enough. Powerful enough. Not anymore. Not now, after all his best years were behind him. Not now, when he's twenty-two and hiding in a motel in a pair of jeans and in desperate need of a haircut, and of a new lens for his glasses to replace the one that got cracked up the middle thanks to a well-placed punch from a certain blond-haired agent he preferred not to think about six feet above where she ought to be.

With a breathy mix of a sigh and a pathetic gasp, he realized exactly what he was.

Heathcliff was a supernova. And, sure, that sounded really cool at the beginning. It looked great on paper. The costume would be spectacular, and Supernova sounds like a fantastic name. But then you really think about it. A supernova – a star a million times brighter, stronger, hotter than the sun. A million times more powerful. When all at once it explodes, and the heat and light it gives off is more energy all at once than the earth's sun is said to give off over its entire lifespan. And then it's gone.

By the time he turned twelve, Heathcliff nearly destroyed the world four times. Ever since, all he had managed to dish out was a series of lame, desperate attempts at domination. He had peaked at the age of eleven. He had blown up, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake, and as it all settled, he was left with nothing. No willpower, or drive, to finish what he started. No real reason to keep on going.

The door to his hotel room was thrown open by a pair of long, metal rods with fists at the end. Dust filled the room and Heathcliff sighed heavily, standing up from his seat on the bed like he weighed six hundred pounds.

"Give it up, Insano," rang a calm, flat voice from somewhere inside the smoke and bark dust. A calm, flat voice belonging to the agent who had destroyed his glasses. "You don't have any way to escape. We've blocked all your exits."

She stepped through the fog so he could see she meant business. If the catsuit wasn't telling him that, he doubted much else would have. Heathcliff merely sighed and readjusted his spectacles, though they were basically useless to him now.

"You've got to stop living in the past, Agent Pufferfish," he said, peering at her through his one good lens. "I'm not Insano anymore."

"Oh, of _course_ he isn't," groaned another voice, also female, but higher-pitched, from somewhere behind Pufferfish. Agent Wheezer, no doubt.

"Alright, what's your name _now_, psycho?" Agent Braceface added. Heathcliff smiled at the space over Ruby's shoulder, hoping he was looking the other man right in the face.

"Supernova," he said gleefully, and the fight began.


	3. Ultraviolet

**Fun fact:** Words cannot describe how much I need _The Villain Virus_. I have heard very good things. Sigh. Only a few more weeks. Also, wow, two out of three prompts have been Ruby-centric. Can you tell who my favorite character is?

**Challenge Number:** Three  
**Challenge Prompt:** Ultraviolet  
**Challenge Subject: **Ruby Peet  
**Rating: **K

THIS IS A LINE BREAK

"Explain to me how this is possible," Rebecca Peet demanded, her voice so filled with rage that the nurse behind the desk visibly flinched, as if scared the woman was going to hit her.

"Unfortunately, ma'am, sun intolerance is a known, if rare, medical condition," the doctor interrupted, putting himself between the frightened nurse and the angry mother. "What Ruby has is professionally known as solar urticaria. It is _incredibly_ rare, but with the correct medications, your daughter will be fine."

Jeremy Peet, who stood just behind his wife, just close enough to be able to grab her if she threw herself over the desk to throttle the doctor, set the baby carrier on the waiting room's table and began fussing lamely with the little girl's blankets, pulling them away and dabbing at the sweat that appeared on her body to try and get her to stop thrashing around like she was going to explode. Ruby was only a few months old and was covered in awful red splotches. Her thin blond hair was frizzier than normal and she whined loudly, throwing her small, swollen fists everywhere.

"This is your fault," Rebecca hissed, and Jeremy looked up to see she was speaking to him. "You and your family's stupid allergies to everything."

"Your mother is lactose intolerant and your father and sisters are allergic to literally every piece of naturally occurring plant matter ever put on God's green earth," Jeremy snapped, refusing to put up with any abuse from his wife that he didn't need to, especially while there was a baby in front of him shrieking like her skin was on fire (and it certainly felt like it was, though neither of her parents knew that).

"Yes, but none of them are allergic to the _sun_," Rebecca said through clenched teeth.

"Mr. and Mrs. Peet, if you two would please follow me to the back room, I'll see if I can get your little one feeling any better," the doctor said suddenly, and Jeremy hefted up his daughter's baby carrier and followed the man and his red-faced wife into the back room.

"Explain to me when the splotches began appearing," the doctor instructed once everyone in the room was getting settled.

"We had a picnic in the backyard," Rebecca said stiffly, her arms crossed tightly and her eyes on the floor. "We noticed Ruby getting fussy and her skin getting pink so we took her in and got one of the housekeepers to find some aloe for her because we thought she got a sunburn."

"We tried to have them put her down for a nap, but she just wouldn't have it, and her skin kept getting redder and redder. We brought her in here because we didn't know what else to do," Jeremy explained, lifting Ruby out of her carrier and placing her on the small examination table in the room. The doctor nodded his head appreciatively and squeezed some white cream into his gloved hand.

"That was a good decision," he admitted. "I doubt you would have figured out what was wrong with her just by using Google. Solar urticaria is incredibly rare. There have only been about one hundred noted carriers of the disease in the last century."

"Well, she's going to live, isn't she?" Rebecca demanded, her voice slowly edging up back to anger.

"Yes, yes, yes," the doctor nodded. "No need to worry. This cream I'm putting on her now is meant to take away the itching and sooth the heat coming from it. You're going to need to apply this to her before and after you take her outside in the sunlight, and when you do take her out, make sure as much of her skin is covered as possible. Your stroller for her has a sun cover, doesn't it?"

Rebecca looked over at Jeremy cluelessly. Jeremy shrugged and looked back at the doctor. "She has a nanny," he explained. "She's on vacation this week which is why we brought her in ourselves."

"I'm probably missing a client call," Rebecca grumbled angrily, and she checked her phone only to furiously shove it back into her bag. "There's no service here," she said to Jeremy under her breath, looking like she was going to throw her phone on the floor.

The doctor raised an eyebrow but said nothing, and went back to applying cream to the now much more content child. "You're going to need to practically bathe her in sunscreen before she goes out," the doctor added. "These rashes are incredibly itchy, irritating, and painful. Regular allergy medicine might be enough to keep the majority of the pain away, but this cream will stop the itching, and regular dousing in sunscreen and wearing long sleeves should help keep the rashes to a minimum."

Ruby was smiling up at the doctor, opening and closing her fists, that, while still red, were looking much less swollen. She cooed happily, and a little bubble of saliva popped against her bright lips. She turned to her parents and did the same and Rebecca sighed heavily, pulling out her wallet.

"I knew she'd be expensive," she grumbled, quiet enough where the doctor knew she had said it just to her husband. She pulled out a credit card and handed it to the doctor. "Give us as much of that cream as you have on hand, and any instruction sheets the nanny's going to need to put it on her. We have a cruise for Jamaica leaving in two days and we're not going to be around to make sure she doesn't screw up."

The doctor frowned at Rebecca and opened his mouth to say something when he remembered that it really wasn't his job to critique parenting skills. He just looked down at the small child grasping at the air with a grin on her tiny mouth. She was small, and very sickly-looking, though the smile on her face helped to dissipate some of that. Her hair was very thin and fair, but her eyes were luminous and happy. The doctor tore his eyes away from her and took the credit card from her mother. It wasn't his job to tell people how to raise their children. It was his job to make them well again.

He clicked on his radio. "Jane, how many tubes of the urticaria cream do we have left?"


	4. Insomniac

**Fun fact:** Aaaand I'm back. Catering to the two people on the planet who read this fic. The cool thing about that is that you know every chapter is written with you in mind and is therefore dedicated to you. Note: I swear at some point I will write one of these that isn't depressing.[Spoilers for Book 4.]

**Challenge Number: **Four  
**Challenge Prompt:** Insomniac  
**Challenge Subject:** Julio "Flinch" Escala  
**Rating: **T

THIS IS A LINE BREAK

Flinch couldn't sleep.

It was the guilt that took his restful nights; the guilt of robbing a boy of his memories. Not just the bad, but the good as well. The guilt that came with the knowledge that now this boy would never get his family back. Or his friends back. Or his old life back.

Every night when Flinch laid back on his pillow, the sounds of his grandmother's quiet snoring permeating the walls of his bedroom and lulling him into a comfortable quiet, he would close his eyes and feel the sharp, phantom stab at his brain, identical to the one he had caused Heathcliff Hodges only months before. His eyes would shoot open, and he would stare at the ceiling until his eyes hurt, and then he would close them and try to sleep again, only to be awoken again by the violent pain in his head.

He would wander out of bed and chug a soda or an energy drink from the fridge to make himself forget about sleep. He would sit on the couch and watch the muted television, forcing himself to stay awake by squinting at the Spanish subtitles that ran along the border of the screen. When boredom overtook him he would walk around the neighborhood in his pajamas. He would listen to cats yowling at each other or count all the lights that were still on in the neighborhood.

He would go home and lay in bed again, or maybe on the couch, and try to sleep. But he would dream of being separated from his home. His family. His grandmother. The only person he had who had cared about him his entire life. He couldn't sleep after that.

His grandmother started buying him sleeping medicine that he took with his pills for his attention deficit disorder. After a while, his side of the bathroom had accumulated more pill bottles than hers.

One afternoon, while he and Matilda were studying in his living room, he asked her to punch him in the face. To knock him out. He knew he had a better chance of getting it done himself, but he couldn't risk breaking his nose. She looked very scared and told him she wouldn't. He begged her. She went home.

The next time he was called to the Playground, he was called alone. A concerned group of scientists ran tests on his brain. Ruby told him that it wasn't his fault Heathcliff had lost his memories. Had lost everything. What he had done was a necessity. His mission had still succeeded.

Even Heathcliff told him it was okay. That he wasn't angry.

Of course he wasn't angry. He didn't have anything to be angry about. He didn't remember anything that Flinch had forced him to lose.

It wasn't really insomnia. Not really. Insomnia was when you weren't ever tired.

Flinch was always tired. He just couldn't sleep.


	5. Paper Airplane

**Challenge Number:** Five  
**Challenge Prompt:** Paper Airplane  
**Challenge Subject:** Platinumshipping [Jackson Jones/Mindy Beauchamp]  
**Rating:** K

THIS IS A LINE BREAK

It was Big Stupid Meeting Day, which was, unsurprisingly, not the actual name of the event. It was, however, the name Jackson found far superior to its actual name, and therefore the one he referred to it by. (Not around Ruby, though, because that would earn him a quick whack on the back of the head.)

He was sitting in a folding chair – one of the many lined up across the floor of the Playground. In equally uncomfortable chairs on all sides of him were his teammates, NERDS scientists, graduated-and-still-active members of NERDS, and government officials. A big screen at the front of the rows of chairs showed the face of a beaten up CIA director or something. iPads sat in holders at the front of the crowd, facing up at the speaker, who stood behind a wooden podium. Ruby Peet sat in a far more comfortable-looking chair, her legs crossed primly, her hair straightened and her glasses polished, looking like the epitome of perfection and leadership. Heathcliff Hodges sat beside her, dressed in a white shirt and suspenders and looking horribly awkward with a sea's worth of pomade in his hair and glasses that appeared to be steaming up.

Jackson and Flinch had been holding a competition to see whose stupid facial expressions would get her attention first, but she had been very easily ignoring them by keeping her eyes on the speaker.

After about twenty minutes of trying and failing to distract Ruby in the most irritating way possible, Jackson took to scanning the surrounding crowd for people he knew. He challenged himself to guess the names of all of the scientists in the row in front of him, but gave up after three. He noticed, then, in the third row from the front, a head of shiny white-blond hair. The stance of her shoulders was relaxed, and the boys sitting on either side of her were showing her things on tablets, or whispering to her or each other. She looked beautiful, even though all Jackson could see of her was the back of her head.

Jackson leaned over Flinch to snag a thin notebook from Duncan's lap. The boy looked over and raised an eyebrow, and gritted his teeth as the blond ripped a page out of the spiral, emitting a long, disruptive noise. The speaker faltered and the people in their seats turned towards the NERDS to see what the noise had been. On stage, Ruby covered her face with her slowly-swelling hands and shook her head despondently. Heathcliff had one hand over his mouth to cover a growing smile.

Jackson waited a beat before waving chipperly to the growing number of staring eyes. Gradually, attention fell back on the speaker and they continued. Jackson tossed Duncan's notebook back at him and started folding the paper in his lap.

"Stop it," Matilda managed to grumble out of the side of her mouth. "Ruby's going to kill us."

"I'm not doing anything to affect Ruby," Jackson whispered back. "Just keep your eyes forward and pretend you care about what's happening." The boy folded the paper along the invisible guidelines he was imagining, and after an intense minute of work, he held a beautifully sculpted paper airplane in his hands.

"Stop it," Flinch muttered suddenly. "Stop it now. Don't you _dare_. Ruby will _kill _us, man!"

"Chill," Jackson said, raising the plane to his eye and doing a few practice thrusts. "It's gonna be fiiiine…"

Matilda leaned over Jackson to Flinch. "The minute he throws it, you piggyback me out of here."

"Yes, ma'am," Flinch grinned.

"Hey, you can fly," Duncan said. "How do you expect me to escape Ruby's wrath?"

Jackson grinned and let the plane go.

No one would have noticed (probably) had Heathcliff not had a conniption and started laughing so hard that he had to bite down on the cuff of his shirt. (Since losing his memory, he seemed to have gained a bigger funny bone.) Ruby and the speaker (not to mention the rest of the audience) looked from him to the airplane he was pointing at with a shaky finger. The plane came close enough for Mindy to snatch it from the air and roll her eyes at it affectionately.

Ruby stood up so quickly she knocked her chair over. "_JACKSON JONES_," she shrieked, and the NERDS dove from their chairs and scrambled from the Playground so quickly you would have thought they had been electrocuted.


	6. Dandelion Seed

Challenge Number: Six  
Challenge Prompt: Dandelion Seed  
Challenge Subject: Jackson Jones  
Rating: K

THIS IS A LINE BREAK

Jackson looked out the glass door that led to his backyard. The grass was brown and patchy and dead. Leaves from their neighbor's oak tree had jumped ship and landed in unceremonious piles around their yard. Their decorative pond was empty and filled with acorns and plant mold. The only thing growing was dandelions. Dozens and dozens of fluffy, white dandelions on stocky green-brown stems, growing in perfect rows like they had been planted there. They sprang up in beautifully ordered rows, until they were wrenched from their beds by the blond woman leaning over the beds.

Jackson opened the glass door and walked into the backyard.

"It's going to snow," he said, shoving his hands into his pockets. His mother wrenched on a weed so hard that she went tumbling onto her back. She and Jackson laughed and he sat on the ground next to her. She sat up and handed him the dandelion. "Thanks," he smiled, and he blew on it, watching all of the seeds go swirling into the air. He leaned forward and pulled one up to hand to his mother, who did the same and laughed as the wind blew them into her son's hair.

"It's going to snow," Jackson said again, and his mother just smiled at the sky.

"Not if you don't want it to," she said, her voice quiet and musical, just how he remembered it.

Jackson looked over at his mother, who sat staring into the sky dreamily, the way she had stared at everything. "I miss you," he said, and he heard his voice break. "I miss you so much, Mom."

Without turning her eyes from the sky, she reached out a hand and found her son's, intertwining their fingers. "I'm right here, Jackie. I'm not going anywhere."

"But you _did_. You died."

His mother laughed and smiled at him. "But not really, right?" she asked. "Would you be right here, thinking about me, if I had really died? A person is only dead when nobody remembers them. And you remember me."

"We all remember you," Jackson said quietly. His mother handed him another dandelion.

"You ate one of these when you were little," she said fondly. "You were sitting out here while I gardened, you pulled a weed from my weed bowl, and shoved the little fluff ball in your mouth."

"You've told me that story," Jackson said. "…I guess that's how you're telling it to me now, right?"

"I am how you remember me. Are you going to make a wish?"

Jackson squinted at the weed and blew. He watched the seeds dance and float slowly back to earth. "I wished for you to not be dead," he said. His mother squeezed his hand.

"Jackie," she said quietly. "It doesn't work like that."

"My wish. My rules."

"You always were a stubborn one. Hand me a dandelion."

Jackson searched the ground and found one next to him. He pulled it up and handed it to his mom, who studied it for a long moment before giving it a long, elegant breath of air. Jackson watched the ball of fluff disappear and then look at his mother expectantly. "What did you wish for?" he asked eagerly.

"I wished for my family to be able to move on," she said, and her voice seemed to echo through the world. She turned to Jackson and gave him a sad smile. "Oh, don't cry, Jackie. All the Kleenex is inside."

Jackson sniffled and counted the tears as he felt them drip down his face.

Onetwo.

Three.

Four.

"I just want you to be happy," she said, reaching out and wiping them away with the pad of her thumb, which felt so far away now. "I just want you to wake up."

Jackson sobbed.

His mother got up on her knees to press a kiss to the top of her son's head.

"I wish you'd wake up, Jackson."

And he did. His eyes were on his dark ceiling. He could hear a television on somewhere. He could feel a chill on his cheeks where the cold air clung to the tears.

He missed his mom. He missed her getting him up for school. He missed her brushing his hair. He missed her taking him shopping and letting him ride in the cart, even though he was too old. He missed someone calling him "Jackie" in a way that wasn't embarrassing. He missed weeding the backyard with her. He even missed when she'd get mad and call him by his full name and march him to his time-out corner.

And all she wanted him to do was move on.

So Jackson spent one more night crying into his pillow, letting out all his anger and sadness, taking it all out on his bed sheets. He watched his depression float away like dandelion seeds, and he moved on, as best he could.


End file.
